Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! vol. 4

Tanuki treasure?  That’s what Asakusa and Mizusaki are chasing at the start of this volume when they go for a trip in the countryside during school break.  Their quest takes them through a village with an interesting history and a lot of tanuki wandering around its rural parts.  Yet even if the treasure isn’t found, Asakusa comes back from the trip with something even greater:  Inspiration.  She’s got the idea for Eizouken’s next project, “Tanuki El Dorado.”  It’s going to be the club’s most ambitious project yet as it will require them to level up their storytelling and artistic skills in order to tell a story of conflict that avoids the pitfalls of reducing either side’s perspective to good or evil and of glamorizing war in the process.

Can they pull it off?  Well, we don’t see the finished project shown off in their world in this volume, so the jury’s still out.  What we do get, however, is to see the story of “Tanuki El Dorado” realized as a short story in vol. 4 itself.  Conventional wisdom says that you never actually show the work being made in stories about creating books/film/TV shows/manga/etc. because the creative work in question rarely matches up to the praise being heaped upon it.  

This is one of those rare exceptions as the story the girls of Eizouken come up with for their anime is actually really good.  It avoids the pitfalls they’re worried about while also coming up with a whimsical, oddball solution to the conflict at hand.  The creative back-and-forth between the crew is also engaging and shows how differing perspectives can help work out a story’s issues.  This is solid stuff and elevates the volume as a whole.  I’m just left wondering where they’re going to go from here as the final chapter in vol. 4 implies a clean break with all the good stuff here into something new.  Not that this isn’t a bad thing, but what’s here has me wanting to spend a little more time in and with “Tanuki El Dorado.”